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Vintage Mini-Split

A friend of mine has asked me to remove a small mini-split from a commercial building he has. The building opened in 1986, so I presume this is the age of the unit. The make is Heat Controller. It has an R-22 tag on it. There is a wall mounted evaporator about the size of a small microwave. It has a thermostat knob and four pushbuttons (off, fan, low cool, high cool) on the front. Air flows through the front mounted evap coil and out a louver on the top. I didn't get a good look at the condensing unit, but it is about the size of a medium sized microwave. There are quick connects on each end of the linesets.

Does anyone know anything about these units? I wonder what capacity it is? He says it won't run now, but that it was used in the last few years and worked fine.

one of my customers has one of those in the office in his drycleaner. He bought it at Grainger in the mid 80's. He asked me to check it, so I threw on the gauges and pressures were 90/500. (the highest R-22 pressures I had ever seen)

I cleaned the coil, oiled the fan motor, and changed some burned connections. pressures were now something like 75/350. The next week the compressor locked up.

It was the middle of a heatwave and he need cooling immediately so I dropped in an old 10 seer Tappan condenser I had laying around.

The new unit had a much bigger condenser coil than the old one, so I had to really overcharge it to get the pressure up so the cap tubes would feed properly. I pumped it down, cut a few inches off the cap tubes, recovered some r-22, and the pressures were now great.

Last year I asked him if he was ready to replace it with a Fujitsu and he just laughed and said its never worked so good and he hopes it will go another 20 years.